Pop Goes China

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Pop Goes China

As the "spring wind of marketization" scatters ashes from the Tiananmen Square massacre across China, the masses have found a fashionable opiate - modern media.

China Pop is a report of the mainland's seemingly awkward lurch into the 21st century. Using Tiananmen Square as a cultural and historical linchpin, Jianying Zha, a Chinese expat and journalist, has written a melancholy, often beautiful book on the recent changes in Chinese popular culture. She paints a picture of a land in anxious transition, one moving from state-sanctioned society to a culture tangled in economic growth and weakening central control.

Zha's tales captivate - from depictions of the wildly popular TV soap Yearning, a bizarre mixture of sentimentalism and cynicism, to "scar literature," a genre of fiction that deals with the taboo of the Cultural Revolution, to gossipy tabloids on pop idols for which the country has a seemingly insatiable appetite. Postmodernism has even scaled the Great Wall. Red Sun, a top-selling audiocassette, sets hymns praising Chairman Mao to a soft rock beat. Mao goes Muzak.

More disturbing, Zha quips, is the increasing "Whopperization" of Chinese culture. News lite. Communism lite. "Tiananmen was the turning point ... as the engine of economic reform has shifted into overdrive, the largest population on earth has set off in a frantic race for material wealth."

This trend will accelerate to breakneck speed in 1997 - the year China reabsorbs the capitalist, media-saturated island of Hong Kong. CIM, a massive multimedia conglomerate in the British city, is already leading the way, sinking its claws into a plethora of mainland ventures.

Zha expresses vague ambivalence toward this quickly purchased cultural renaissance. But one point is made abundantly clear: the most populous country in the world is reinventing mass media.